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Like gettin’ geeky?

Try ROBOCOPY. Comes with Windows. Can make full copies of things, incrementally update backups, and much much more. You can exclude some files, remove those in a destination area that don’t exist in the source area, the list goes on. It can log what it does and I find it a dandy tool to make extra spare copies of files I don’t want to lose.

To give you an idea of its capability, here’s a sample backup script made using ROBOCOPY… I schedule this to run every night in the wee hours. Feel free to adapt it to be your own.

Enjoy!

-Noel

That’s good news! Couple this with the other perceived downsides of a Microsoft account and I feel all the better about always finding the way to set up with a local account.

-Noel

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cyberSAR

I’m good to go for a couple of years yet since Microsoft has produced literally nothing in Win 11 that I find compelling (though TBH I do kind of like rounded corners vs. square, but that alone is just not enough to want to upgrade). The non-collapsable ribbon in Explorer alone is enough to offset easier to find Window borders (admittedly, I did find a hack that still works to return Explorer to the Win 10 implementation, but still…)

-Noel

I recommend having several browsers on any platform so you can have a primary (secured and paranoid) browser and then one that is plain default as a fallback in case you have an issue on a site.

May I add the following advice?

If you find a site that’s broken when your security-conscious browser tries to access it, please think twice, then think again before choosing to push forward and access it with a less secure setup.

Some of my experience:

The Brave browser, with the uBlock Origin and uMatrix add-ons (and a fair bit of additional configuration) has proven a very secure and workable browser for me. And if I find a site that doesn’t work, after taking my own advice above, I don’t use an alternate browser, I figure out what is breaking the site and if I deem the site worthy of my visit I use the configuration capabilities of the above plug-ins to very selectively enable components it wants to run.

Quite often, especially if the site isn’t broken because of something basic (e.g., google scripts or something) I just walk away from it.

I have used Windows since 2.0 (somehow I missed 1.0). I have never gotten a malware infection.

BTW, one thing I noticed: My workstation is very stable, running 24/7 normally a month at a time (between Windows Updates) without a reboot, but… One night earlier this year I had it lock up and I had to hard reset the system in the morning. I researched why it happened in the Windows Event Log and lo and behold a Brave Browser self update was the very last thing logged. I’m not terribly happy about that, but nothing was lost and I do have multiple backups if they’re needed. I continue to use Brave but if it happens again I may change my tune. An application should not be able to crash or freeze a system.

-Noel

Sigh. I’ve found almost enough workarounds to make Windows 11 the productivity equivalent of a heavily tweaked Windows 10, for which I had found almost enough workarounds to be the productivity equivalent of a heavily tweaked Windows 8.1… Ad nauseum.

Sure, it’s hard to improve on something that’s gotten good over years of refinement. Hard to find new things that evoke the thought “now there’s something we’ve needed.”

When the OS developers get so arrogant as to eliminate the old (and decent) mechanisms without having fully developed their replacements, we get… Modern Windows.

Geez, at least optimize a few key parts of it so it’s even in the same ballpark as its predecessors, performance-wise.

Alas, unless one has no ongoing needs to keep up (which almost everyone does, such as working for a company that will support only the latest OSs sooner or later), one could be forgiven for just stopping all updates and keeping an old Windows 8.1 setup that absolutely had no need to reach anything on the Internet to actually work. I have such a setup dormant on a 11 year old workstation that hasn’t been powered up in quite a few years… Pesumably it will give me some computing capacity after an apocalypse, should I need any such capacity…

I can’t shake the feeling we’ve seen the golden age of general purpose computing come and go…

-Noel

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Steve, Steve S., Cybertooth, AlexEiffel, WSraysig, NaNoNyMouse, SueW, Microfix, DrBonzo, WCHS

I personally haven’t seen a noticeable uptick in spam eMails lately.

That being said, as a general rule spam eMailings always seems to become more numerous over time. When you see a jump I think it’s just that you are noticing that your eMail address was added to some additional dark web list(s) of potential marks through no fault of your own.

A potential real problem people don’t think about is that anti-spam measures are taken at the server level… Apparently my ISP must have other customers who spam folks, since now and again the messages I send to folks get rejected by some big relay systems because their entire source server has been blacklisted. That’s frustrating, especially if one is trying to use eMail to maintain contact with customers who need questions answered.

-Noel

Remember Windows 10 22H2 is only receiving security updates now so it’s the stable/boring version of Windows.

I assume you gestured “air quotes” when typing “stable/boring”.

Perhaps we could say that it is the most stable of the several “current” choices. It’s certainly not more stable than Windows 7 or even 8.1 became.

From my perspective, “boring” – presuming you mean “least likely to become autonomously a new problem to solve” – is not a bad thing.

-Noel

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Microfix, samak, Fred

I second the recommendation for Win 10 22H2. I’ve been running it quite a while now and find it does pretty much everything I need in an engineer/telecommuter/business manager role reliably and without complaint, if in a somewhat bloated way (as usual).

Begs a question, though. This is 2023, and we’re already halfway through… Are there hints of a 23H1?

OpenShell is another way to put another “Start Button” at the left of the taskbar and still have the icons centered and the new Start Button indented. Kind of offers a transition capability for those who might prefer to transition to the new one.

Pretty sure I had found another way (rather than entering a dummy eMail) to set up Win 11 with a local account, but it’s been a while and I have forgotten the details. I definitely did it though.

Most Win 10 / 8.1 / 7 performance and other tweaks still apply to Windows 11.

-Noel

The first benefit I’ve been able to glean was decently performing encryption.

Generally speaking, performance of Windows is downright bad, and the justification for most updates in the past years has been security. A little tough not to make a connection there, eh?

-Noel

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cyberSAR

One wonders why you seem to keep trying to paint my responses as anti-TPM. I’m actually enjoying the use of mine. For what it’s worth, the last several PC workstations I’ve retired from use had hardware that’s capable of supporting Windows 11.

Given that it’s still possible – albeit with significant effort – to tweak and tune Windows 10 and 11 into being high-productivity systems, I personally have no problem with the newest versions requiring hardware that the newest computer systems provide. I tend to buy the newest systems for their performance.

All that said, I would certainly love the new OS versions even more if they could be made to run at least as efficiently as their predecessors.

-Noel

Exactly. I keep them outside. That is a viable strategy.

Not at ALL like the security basis for most modern development, which assumes the malware will be in the kitchen.

If modern security pundits designed kitchens, you’d have to have a conversation with your kitchen knife and prove you have only the best intentions before it would allow you to pick it up. Ultimately you’d give up trying to make your own food and order from their delivery service because it was so difficult to do.

-Noel

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Cybertooth

Most Windows shortcomings can be worked-around with tweaks and 3rd party software.

That doesn’t mean it’s not still drifting further and further from a power user’s dream with every update.

There was a simpler time when the numbers of tweaks needed to have a decent, efficient system were quite small.

Ask yourself… Does Windows 11 do that much more than Windows XP did? Vista was touted as unbelievably inefficient, but it was warp speed faster than current Windows implementations. Try booting it up in a virtual machine on a modern computer some time.

There’s no technical need for all the bloat in a modern system. 170+ processes just to boot up to a desktop? And here we’re talking about adding more software just to make it work reasonably.

I use OpenShell by the way in Win 11. It does help ease the transition, especially since I used it for previous versions.

-Noel

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Cybertooth

I didn’t say there were any downsides to TPM, except that since it’s new it probably has implementations for its usage that are clunky or not quite as refined as they should be.

Indeed, I believe my workstation’s TPM figures prominently in my ability to encrypt my disks without a significant performance downside.

If Windows 11 actually DOES deliver on the promise of “fewer authentications” then let me be the first to applaud the effort. But, being brutally honest, I have to jump through more security hoops today to use Windows than I ever did before. Big picture-wise, things are really not getting easier to use. Maybe the next version will turn all that around. Maybe. I don’t use Win 11 (even in my immersive VM) as much as I do Win 10 yet. The jury is still out.

And let’s not forget that not every security measure is always positive. The Spectre and Meltdown mitigations to Windows were / are just so much theoretical BS for marketing that happened to hammer the performance of all our existing computer systems. Lo and behold, who had new hardware to the rescue? What a coincidence! And it hobbles every PC to this day. Skeptical? Look up “InSpectre” on the web and try disabling what parts of the mitigations that you can.

Security as a marketing tool is just plain evil.

-Noel

We so often see folks tout “security improvement” as a positive thing without any mention of potential usability and performance downsides.

An ideal to use tool might have no security features at all. A kitchen knife, for example – you just walk up to it and use it, and it does exactly what it can and what you want. Maybe you could hurt yourself with it, so you learn not to do that.

Ideal computer security would intrude not at all in your work, and facilitate the machine efficiently doing what it can and what you want with minimum fuss.

There’s an assumption made in the industry that malware WILL get on your system and you WILL do things you’re not supposed to that unfortunately may be a conservative and even sometimes accurate view, but as a basis for all security implementations all it really does for those who legitimately need all the computer power is to cause endless new security layers to be applied that work out to never be quite seamless or easy to navigate.

I count myself as a smart, conscientious computer user, and I’ve lived the dream of disabling UAC since it became a thing, because I want all the capability, yet have never had a malware infection nor lost data. I may have overwritten or deleted a few files inadvertently, but not often, and because I surround myself with backups and follow good practices I’ve never actually lost or destroyed any data permanently. And I get a LOT of work done.

Might this mean the fundamental security assumption at the core of modern computer implementations may not actually apply to everyone?

Sad to say, in the real world so-called experts give lip service to “more security is better” and just saddle technical systems with more and more crap that gets in their users’ way of doing actual work.

And that’s just usability concerns where you might have to authenticate over and over, answering prompt after prompt, because your IT department doesn’t trust you. And sometimes the gear still just refuses to do what you need it to do. We’ve not even begun to talk about how much all the security overhead is slowing down everyone’s computer systems with checks and rechecks at the giga scale. It’s not insignificant. Yet who would dare argue that more security isn’t better?

I urge decision-makers: Next time someone says “We need to make this more secure.”, try to think to ask the question, “What will be the usability and performance costs?” Yes, those exist.

-Noel

Expansive or no, I really don’t want to have to stare at empty space. I have 3 x 30 inch monitors and a 20 inch monitor and I still fill them all up. My computer usage really is that complicated. I’m pretty ruthless about closing things I don’t need, too.

-Noel

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windbg